The argument isn’t new, but David Shields reanimates it in Reality Hunger: that fiction has grown stale, and that the real energy now lives in essays, memoirs, diaries, and formally hybrid works. Shields’s book is itself a collage: part original prose, part unattributed excerpt, part provocation.
“A major focus of Reality Hunger is appropriation and plagiarism and what those terms mean,” he writes. “I can hardly treat the topic deeply without engaging in it. That would be like writing a book about lying and not being permitted to lie in it.” The book originally printed without citations, but legal pressures required an appendix. Shields invited readers to cut those pages out with a knife.
Some of the argument is persuasive. Sebald’s prose, for instance, moves so fluidly between invention and document that the distinction ceases to matter; Woolf’s diaries often feel closer to literature than the fiction they surround. There is vigour in writing that refuses to settle into a genre.
But I hesitate when form is treated as a problem to be solved. Shields implies that the novel, by which he means a certain convention-bound, mid-century form, has become irrelevant. That is too simple. As Zadie Smith puts it: “What is universal and timeless in literature is need. What is not universal or timeless is form. Forms, styles, structures… should change like skirt lengths.”
Shields is right to push against the dullness of convention, but the form evolves, often quietly. Not all revolutions announce themselves.
>thanks for the review. i'm still not sure what i think about shields's method here (i haven't read the book yet but knopf has kindly sent me one)–i'm curious to see his "literary sampling."
>ed biblioklept – I didn't realise how the book was constructed until three-quarters of the way through. Once I knew, it became an irritation because I felt the need to keep referring to the list of citations to see whether an excerpt was Shields's material or a sampling.